Early Indo-European Texts

Albanian

Brian Joseph, Angelo Costanzo, and Jonathan Slocum

This page contains a text in Albanian with a modern English translation.
This particular text and its translation are extracted from a lesson in the
Early Indo-European Online
series, where one may find detailed information about this text
(see the Table of Contents page for Albanian Online in
EIEOL),
and general information about the Albanian language and its speakers' culture.

Translation

Rain and snow mixed together was falling on the foreign soil.
The sleet had drenched the concrete of the runway of the airport, the buildings, and the guards.
It made the field and the hills wet and it was was shining from the black asphalt of the highway.
As though it was not the beginning of autumn, to every other person except the newly-arrived general this monotonous rain would seem a sad coincidence.
He was coming to Albania from a foreign state for the withdrawal of the bones of the soldiers killed in the last world war.
The talks between the two governments had started in the spring, but the final contracts were only signed at the end of August, precisely at the time when the first cloudy skies began.
Therefore it was autumn and the time of rain had come. The General knew this.
Before he set out he had learned, among other things, something about the climate of Albania.
The general knew that in Albania autumn is humid and rainy.
However even though, in the book that he had read, it was written that in Albania autumn is sunny and dry, this rain would not have seemed unexpected.
Quite the opposite. And the reason was that, to him, it had always seemed that his mission could only be accomplished in rain.